Exercise 9: Coding

Admittedly I was more than a little wary of this exercise for a number of reasons.

I took a computer science class in college in 1979 and was absymal. We had to put in our programs on keypunch cards, then hand the cards to a grad student working the computer lab. The mainframe was almost as big as a house. The grad student would run your program and you hoped against hope that you didn't hear one of the grad students yell your name. If they did, you knew your program didn't work and had to be manually stopped. My name got called a lot. As a matter of fact I still have the printout of one of my failed programs because I wrote a recipe on the back of it. There it is, in my recipe collection, a folded piece of green bar continuous computer paper with a cookie recipe on the back and on the front, the words

FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR

My next door neighbor was a computer science major and he basically did my homework for me. I turned in an assignment and the instructor, a computer programmer for a major industry, looked it over, handed it back and said: "Langston, take this to your friend who usually does your homework for you and get him to fix it."

Yes, I was that bad at programming.

Fast forward several decades. Thanks to LibGuides I've amassed a teeny bit of information about html. I have friends who code and I know what coding is. Frequently I drive by a large billboard announcing coding classes. Being a person who always enjoys learning I wondered if I should take coding classes. So, one night I logged onto a website that teaches basic coding. I had to walk a virtual person along a super short sidewalk, down a staircase and to the second sidewalk. All I could manage to do was get the virtual human to tumble down the stairs, stop at the top of the stairs, roll down the stairs ... you get the idea. Needless to say, I crossed coding classes off my to-do list.

Which brings us to SAPL 2.0 and this session on coding. I went to code.org and signed up as a student because I was afraid I'd have to teach something if I signed up as a teacher. With my one and only foray into coding still fresh in my mind I started with the simplest lessons, which are formulated for ages 4-6.

Whoa. I had a blast! My Angry Bird consistently squashed the pig. My bee gathered nectar and made honey. My virtual person has jumped chasms to draw squares, rectangles and the like. I was so into the lessons that I had to remind myself I didn't have to complete the entire 20-hour course in order to write about it. My staff could hear me muttering two left, up one, right two, gather, gather, down two ... followed by the happy sounds of a ticked off bird and a contented bee. The virtual human artist is pretty quiet.

It's block coding and some major universities do use this format, according to code.org. There is a function that allows you to see the actual code instead of the block. Okay, so I might not suck so bad at coding after all.

As I was rattling on about it today, someone asked me how I was doing.

"It's designed for 4- to 6-year-olds, so I'm acing it," I said, much to the delight of a passing patron who burst out laughing.

We'll see how I do after I advance to the high school level course.

Wish me luck because I don't have a neighbor who can code. :-)